It’s the day of the Korean presidential election. The nation is at a crossroads, choosing who will lead it for the next 5 years. Korean voters must weigh important issues of policy, ideology, and personal character when make their decision. But we don’t, so instead of talking about Korea-USA-Japan relations or the Daejang-dong scandal, let’s take a look at the drama queens who the candidates married.
Kim Hyekung
We start out with the 55-year old wife of the left-wing candidate. There’s really not much to say here. She’s just your typical corrupt politician’s wife. When her husband was mayor of a major city she had a few members of his staff assigned to her as full-time personal servants. Among other favors, they took a government credit card and did all of her shopping for her, allegedly spending as much as $100,000. And when she wanted some kind of girlpills but didn’t want the prescription to be in her name, she had one of these servants get a prescription for it.
Kim Keonhee
There’s nothing typical about this 49-year old girlboss who married the candidate for the right-wing party. She’s been stirring up a typhoon of drama and seething.
The first big scandal to hit was over her slightly embellishing her resume. In Korea that generates an incredible amount of seething compared to just straight-up stealing money, so it became a huge campaign issue. She publically apologized, but this only raised more questions. Was she really being sincere, or was she wearing too much makeup to truly feel remorse?
What do you think? Is this bow sincere enough?
Shamans
As the bitterly-fought campaign continues, rumors swirl that our second Ms. Kim is quite fond of shamans. What is a shaman in the Korean context? There are fortune tellers who follow traditions dating back many centuries to before the arrival of foreign religions. Think of it kind of like if European pagans actually still existed. Kim seems to be surrounded by a lot of people who follow those ancient traditions mixed in with Daoism, Buddhism, and just plain old nonsense.
If you don’t dress like this, you ain’t reading my fortune.
The rumors really blow up when her husband is seen at a debate with the Chinese character for king (王) written on his palm. He insists that one of his fans just wrote it on him because he was doing some real king shit. It’s unclear if he also handed him a crown and said “you dropped this”. The public was skeptical of this explanation and assumed it was some kind of good luck charm.
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Seems perfectly normal.
Attention was drawn to various figures hanging around the campaign, like some guy known as Jeon who was caught on video acting like he was part of the staff. The excuse this time was that he’s a Buddhist monk so there’s nothing strange going on, but the Buddhists disavowed any knowledge of him. Some weirdo youtube guru also claims to be mentoring the candidate.
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Master Cheongong looks like a level-headed guy.
Phone Conversations
The drama that had been building up for months explodes when the phone conversations come out. Our heroine Kim had spent several hours on the phone discussing the most sensitive details or her life and her husband’s campaign with a left-wing youtuber, who of course recorded all of it and dumped it all online when it would be most damaging. Why would someone willingly reveal so much to the opposition during a presidential campaign? I guess that’s just how much women like to talk about themselves?
It’s clear from these recordings that the rumors about shamans are well-founded. Kim insists that she doesn’t actually like shamans, she prefers pondering the meaning of life with Daoist and Buddhist cranks and getting her fortune telling from them. For example, she is already planning to move the guest room at the presidential residence because a Daoist master told her it has bad feng shui. More disturbingly, she reveals that she and her husband have made many crucial decisions in their lives and careers based on hocus pocus. It’s even what brought the two together. They both share a gift for clairvoyance. More than just a power couple, they’re a supernatural power couple!
Artist’s rendition of what Kim may look like after she has leveled up her power a bit more.
The phone call provides a lot of other bonus drama, most notably her explaining that the right-wing party isn’t getting metooed nearly as hard as the left because they do a better job of paying off their accusers.
The Pettiest Issues
Despite all this, my favorite drama about her is the pettiest kind. The Korean left can be quite socially conservative, especially when they’re trying to tear down a woman they hate. There’s been a number of accusations about her being too uppity and failing her responsibilities as a good housewife.
A top politician in the opposing party Mr. Song claimed that if her husband was elected, she would be secretly in control of him. The evidence? She speaks to him using an informal mode of speech. This generated some controversy when her defenders pointed out that women now don’t speak to their husbands in a formal tone because they’re not living in medieval times, and maybe Song was being really weird and MGTOWy. Song then backpedaled and claimed that he wasn’t being sexist, and in fact he speaks formally to his wife because she’s a couple years older than him, which just sounds even weirder.
They throw out everything they always say about women. She might have worked at a hostess bar when she was young. She admits to having had plastic surgery, an utterly shocking thing for a Korean woman to do. And finally we get to her greatest sin of all. When she moves into the presidential residence there will only be the pitter patter of 4 cats’ paws because Kim is childless.
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wasnt there some controversy a while back where the president of korea was secretly being controlled by a shaman, seems like a recurring theme in korean politics. Korea seems like it has a cult issue but disappointed we havent seen anything nearly as dramatic as Aum Shinrikyo or Jonestown (yet).
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Yes, the president before last (Park Geunhye) was accused of being controlled by her BFF who was the daughter of one of these weirdo guru types, and it turned out there was definitely a lot of truth to that. She ended up getting impeached and imprisoned. So this has been brought up a lot, that maybe we shouldn't go down that path again.
There's a lot of cults there. In fact, it's probably the best place in the world to go shopping for a cult to join because they've got every flavor. Christian, Buddhist, whatever you want.
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How come no mass suicide though.
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Good question. They probably just were lucky until now when you jinxed it.
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Interesting! I never realized the cult issue there was so big, has there been any prominent violence / terror attacks / mass suicides related to any of those cults, because I havent heard any news of it in the west? Usually it seems like every big rise in cultism is usually accompanied by one violent sect / doomsday cult.
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Remember when that ferry capsized and hundreds of kids got drowned? It turns out it was owned by a cult. They didn't intentionally sink the ship or anything, but they were running it probably as a money-laundering front and were totally incompetent at actually operating the ship which contributed to the disaster.
I don't know of any mass suicides or murders. One big difference with Japan is that through most of South Korea's history they've had to have extremely tight security to catch North Korean spies and terrorists, so it's much harder to get away with preparing for war like Aum Shinrykyo did.
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Wasn't Park's dad also president, and he also took advice from a shaman, his shaman being the dad of the girlboss shaman
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Yes, her dad was Park Chunghee, the dictator in the 1960s-1970s who did the most for better and worse to shape what Korea is today. And according to my friend who lived there at the time the shaman totally was banging her, or at least that's what everyone believed.
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So he's the one to blame huh
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Korea has the highest amount of cults per capita in the world. They also went from 0% to 30% Christian within 50 years of the end of WW2. They are a very superstitious people. I won't label them as religious because they are so blatantly materialistic and greedy that it's hard to believe the country is possessed of piety and morals.
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Christianity started spreading in the late 1800s, with both Protestant and Catholic missionary activity. It had a pretty major impact from the beginning since they had a monopoly on women's education and were closely tied to resistance against the Japanese occupation. There were many Christians in the north at the end of WW2 and many of them fled to the south during the Chinese invasion. I guess that's where your idea that Christianity emerged suddenly then comes from, or maybe you just imagined it while huffing glue.
Okay, let's see who's throwing stones here. Oh look, you 6 hours ago:
I feel so embarrassed on your behalf just reading this.
Gladwell writes pop fluff for people who could charitably be described as midwits. He's hoping that you know nothing about the topic he's writing about because then you'd realize he's full of shit. There have been many many crashes caused by air crew not performing well together in a crisis. This has nothing to do with "Confucian" culture. It happens everywhere when there's an experienced captain and a junior copilot. If anything, the obvious comparison to make is with that one crash where the Egyptian war hero got spatially disoriented and his copilot didn't speak up enough. The power dynamic on the KAL flight was all about deference to the military service of the captain, which is not traditional in Korean society and was a product of the generation that went through the war.
A great deal of labor by people smarter than us (many at the NTSB) went into studying these problems and developing the practice known as Crew Resource Management where pilots are trained on how to cooperate in an emergency. This training is done everywhere airliners fly. Do try to keep up, sweaty.
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I am Korean didn't read lol
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If you are legit Korean and read Gladwell as baby's first introduction to English, that I could understand.
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Wrong and racist? Must be white
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Catholics tend to be left-wing which destroys your argument and really calls into question whether you know wtf you're talking about.
Zoomer rebellion against your parents' culture is the whitest thing possible. I'd get along better with your parents than you do. Do me a favor and get me in touch with them so they can set me up on a marriage date with one of your female relatives.
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When did I say Koreans were right wing? I think you are mixing up some arguments here.
My culture, like the rest of the Western world, is American culture.
My Korean mom won't frick you no matter how much yellow fever you have. I don't think you can get a marriage date with one of my relatives unless you are Christian, sorry.
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Way to post your Ls. Please don't direct your gochujangcel seething about not getting a gf at church toward me.
The only fever I have is for going to Costco with ajummas and getting the best deals on everything. Which is unironically probably a better relationship with your mom than you'll ever have.
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Cope and seethe, incel 💅💅
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Do they still all believe in fan-death?
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Fear of fan death is still very much a thing in Korea. Even kids believe it's true.
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